Caesar Dies eBook

He made no false claim when he called Rome the City
of Commodus and himself the Roman Hercules.
The vast majority of Romans were unfit to challenge
his contempt of them, and his contempt was never under
cover for a moment.

Debauchery, of wine and women, entered not at all
into his private life although, in public, he encouraged
it in others for the simple reason that it weakened
men who otherwise might turn on him. He was never
guilty of excesses that might undermine his strength
or shake his nerves; there was an almost superhuman
purity about his worship of athletic powers.
He outdid the Greeks in that respect. But he
allowed the legend of his monstrous orgies in the
palace to gain currency, partly because that encouraged
the Romans to debauch themselves and render themselves
incapable of overthrowing him, and partly because it
helped to cover up his trick of employing a substitute
to occupy the royal pavilion at the games when he
himself drove chariots in the races or fought in the
arena as the gladiator Paulus.

Men who had let wine and women ruin their own nerves
knew it was impossible that any one, who lived as
Commodus was said to do, could drive a chariot and
wield a javelin as Paulus did. Whoever faced
a Roman gladiator under the critical gaze of a crowd
that knew all the points of fighting and could instantly
detect, and did instantly resent pretense, fraud,
trickery, the poor condition of one combatant or the
unwillingness of one man to have at another in deadly
earnest, had to be not only in the pink of bodily
condition but a fighter such as no drunken sensualist
could ever hope to be. So it was easy to suppress
the scandal that the gladiator Paulus was the emperor
himself, although half Rome half-believed it; and
the substitute who occupied the seat of honor at the
games—­ageing a little, growing a little
pouchy under eyes and chin—­was pointed
to as proof that Commodus was being ruined by the
life he led.

The trick of making use of the same substitute to
save the emperor the boredom of official ceremony,
whenever there was no risk of the public coming close
enough to detect the fraud, materially helped to strengthen
the officially fostered argument that Commodus could
not be Paulus.

So the mystery of the identity of Paulus was like
all court secrets and most secrets of intriguing governments,
no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an
insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists
of the court news, absolutely in control of all the
channels through which facts could reach the public,
easily offset the constant leakage from the lips of
slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted
news. Those actually in the secret, flattered
by the confidence and fearful for their own skins,
steadfastly denied the story when it cropped up.
Last, but not least, was the law, that made it sacrilege
to speak in terms derogatory to the emperor.
A gladiator, though the crowd might almost deify
him, was a casteless individual, unprivileged before
the law, whom any franchised citizen would rate as
socially far beneath himself. To have identified
the emperor with Paulus in a voice above a whisper
would have made the culprit liable to death and confiscation
of his goods.